I don’t know if I told you, but I am unwinding my reliance on proprietary cloud.
You see, around this time last year I had a bright idea to back up the Pixie’s Google Drive. What I did was back up links to files that were locked into a proprietary format, without even really understanding it. Then I moved the files and poof! they were all destroyed.
Around that time, an accountant asked me why you’d bother backing up something that is in the cloud.
My response to her was: Because you have absolutely no control over it. You own your data, but if a company like Xero has some kind of meltdown for some kind of reason, or goes bust for any reason (including malpractice or, god forbid, fraud) then you are fucked if your data goes down with them.
Cybersecurity pros won’t argue with me on that one.
When I began thinking through the reasons why I just dived into a Google ecosystem without thinking, it was because of a couple of things. One was ease and simplicity. One was immediate sharing.
Yet, 99% of our clients are in a Microsoft ecosystem. Our team fluctuates from Just Me to Me And Contractors, and we use a self-hosted project system + repos.
Benefit of sharing? Almost zero. It’s so close to zero that it’s about 0.01% of use.
This means that even if we send our clients online docs, they will download them into their preferred formats, and then send via email.
(The fact that they are causing file proliferation doesn’t ever occur to them.)
Therefore, use for us requires thinking from a bunch of directions:
our clients’ systems and preferences
the six thinking hats
my innate Tinfoil Hat personality
storage, short-term and long-term
financial commitments
data access and behavioural patterns of use
… among other things.
The solution is that I’ve made a decision to exit out of proprietary systems and into Open Source formats for everything in-house. And I’m moving to a non-linear file system, one that not only provides visual representation of data relationships, but allows files and resources to be accessed from a single, central place.
Of course, it means that there are some knotty problems to solve around storage both hot and cold (short- and long-term). And there is ahead of me some epic work in exporting, converting, and stashing data.
But the pay-off.
Ahhh, this is the promised land.
It’s a time in which everything is owned, synced, on every device. It’s secure. It’s stored in ISO-compliant formats, meaning that it will be accessible forever, regardless of device or operating system or platform. It’s convertible for our clients’ needs easily. And the manufacturing side of the business takes up fuck-all space (because *.md files are literally 23kb in size).
That’s the land on the other side of this long, winding bridge that’s swaying in the breeze right now.
Between now and the end of the year, my job is just to take one small step after the other along that bridge. By the time the year turns, we’ll be in a place that looks very different, that is more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable, and that sets us up for Stage 2 of our epic systematisation campaign.
This week I took the first teetering steps towards that land. I steadfastly donned my blinkers, so I couldn’t see the drop underneath me, and I refused to look up and become daunted by the journey.
But every journey begins with a single step.